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Six Surprising Things About Orioles Manager Earl Weaver, Dead at 82

Earl Weaver, Hall of Fame manager who managed the Baltimore Orioles to the 1970 World Championship, has died at the age of 82. Known for an explosive temper that was often directed at umpires, Weaver will be remembered as a larger-than-life figure. Once tossed for smoking a cigarette in the dugout, Weaver delivered the lineup the next game with a candy cigarette in his mouth. He was ejected again.

But as with so many of the game’s legends, there’s an intriguing disconnect between myth and reality with Weaver. Here are six little known facts about the Oriole great.

1) We tend to think of Weaver as an old guy, and, indeed, he was the prototype for the grizzled manager in Bull Durham. But Weaver was only 37 years old when he got his first managerial job–only five years older than his star player Frank Robinson. He was only 55 years old when he retired in 1982.

2) Weaver got off to one of the fastest starts in managerial history. He took the Orioles to the World Series in 1969, his first full year as a manager, where they lost to the Amazing Mets. Weaver won the World Series in his second season, and returned to the World Series again in 1971, losing to the Pirates. In those first two seasons he won 217 games, and added 101 in 1971. His Orioles made the playoffs in 1973 and 1974, losing to the As. Weaver would make only one more playoff appearance in his career, winning 102 games in 1979, and losing to the Pirates in the World Series.

3) Despite his penchant for getting ejected, Weaver is not the career leader in that category. Bobby Cox holds the major league record with 158, followed by John McGraw with 131 and Leo Durocher with 124. Weaver’s 98 ejections are an American League record.

4) Weaver turned Cal Ripken, Jr into a shortstop. In the minors, Ripken played mostly third base. Weaver gave Ripken a trial at third base after being called up in 1981. And after starting Ripken at third base at the beginning of the 1982 season, Weaver moved him to short mid way through the season, and he’d play there for most of his career. Ripken didn’t fit the “good hit/no field little guy” stereotype of a shortstop prevalent at the time, and Weaver’s successful move helped to paved the way for future generations of large power hitting shortstops like Alex Rodriquez and Derek Jeter.

5) The year after Weaver left the Orioles in 1982, the team won the World Series with Joe Altobelli. Altobelli would only manage the Orioles for another year and a half, one of the shortest tenures, ever for a championship winning manager.

6) As a proponent of the walk and the three-run homer and a hater of the sacrifice bunt, Weaver’s teams played “Moneyball” long before it was fashionable. His teams consistently ranked near the top of the league in walks and on base percentage. However, second baseman Davey Johnson once approached Weaver with a series of computer printouts arguing that he should bat cleanup. Weaver listened to Johnson babble about standard deviations for a while, then tossed out the printouts and continued to bat Johnson at the bottom of the order.

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Good catch. For some strange reason, baseball-reference.com highlights World Series appearances for managers, but not division wins and playoff appearances. The point still holds that the first half of Weaver’s career was remarkably successful, the second half much less so.

well….when free agency came in after the 1976 season, Baltimore was an organization that lost a lot of stars: Reggie Jackson, Bobby Grich, Ross Grimsley, Wayne Garland and had to trade away players like Ken Holtzman before they became free agents. Two of the biggest spenders were the Orioles’s division rivals: Yankees and Red Sox. The fact that Baltimore was able to compete focused attention on Weaver. Another interesting thing is that Weaver’s teams usually played well in September but usually lost close pennant races (1974 was an exception). They had all kinds of problems with slow April starts that Weaver was never able to fix.